A man sits on top of a mountain of spoons. 22,353 of them, all real, sourced from across the filming city because production couldn't find enough in one place. He's the fictitious employee who went through every single one testing Graza's mayo recipe. He looks comfortable up there.

This is Graza's biggest paid campaign ever. It's also the first time they've really needed one.

Graza launched in 2022 without a media budget. Handwritten notes to influencers. Product seeded to pet stores and toy shops on the logic that those customers cook. They sold out their entire DTC stock in a day. Whole Foods called. Within four years they were the fifth-largest olive oil brand in the US, in 28,000 retail locations, having spent almost nothing on paid media. The squeeze bottle was the ad — every cooking video on TikTok has an oil-in-the-pan shot, and Graza's neon green squeeze bottle on a counter said more about someone's taste than any campaign could.

Mayo is a different problem. Hellmann's has 150 years and every diner table in America. You can't out-vibe that. You can't seed your way past it. But there was something else to fix too. Kali Shulklapper, Graza's director of brand marketing: "There is this misconception around the brand that because we have such fun packaging and a playful brand voice, we can't possibly produce such high quality oil." The brief to nice&frank was to put the quality story at the forefront — not instead of the personality, on top of it.

The obvious execution writes itself. Olive farm. Sunlight. Wooden boards. Someone with good cheekbones talking about craftsmanship. Kali saw it immediately: "'Hey, we're at our olive farms, this is how the olives are harvested' — but that's not the way our brand is set up."

So they went looking for the real numbers instead. Graza tested over 150 mayo formulas, each one more than 150 times. Julian Cohen, CD at nice&frank, did the maths out loud: "150 times 150 is 22,500. That means they must have used 22,500 spoons to perfect the mayo. So we thought about telling that story in a beautiful, interesting way: what if this tester was sitting on this mountain of spoons?"

Each of the three spots works the same way — one real production fact, rendered strange. Two actual Graza master testers, one who sniffs and one who tastes, became twins with the world's most specific job. The precise window for harvesting olives became a seesaw. The absurdism isn't invented. It's what the process looks like when you refuse to make it boring.

Director Elliott Power doesn't cast commercial models. His process finds people who look like they actually exist — faces you recognise without knowing why. Julian: "That adds to the peculiarity and the authenticity of the films." The visual references ran from Lanthimos's Poor Things to Martin Parr's ugly-beautiful everyday photography to Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates, which Grace Hwang said gave the visuals "the little extra push that this universe needed and craved" at a make-or-break moment in production. Dutch angles throughout. Extreme perspectives. A visual language that rejects normal food cinematography with the same energy Graza's squeeze bottle rejected the glass bottle category.

The consumer reaction shot — someone staring down the lens in a funny, unsettling close-up at the end of each spot — came late. nice&frank almost didn't include it. Julian: "We thought we should probably include that… and what if they were just watching what our other characters are doing? It almost added to the strangeness and peculiarity, and it felt super real to show their reaction." The bystander processing the obsession. That's all of us.

The campaign runs across NBCUniversal streaming with OOH to follow. Top Chef Season 23, $250,000 to the winning chef, every contestant cooking with Graza products on screen throughout the season. The conversation with NBCUniversal started around Frizzle, Graza's high-heat oil. It expanded until it was everything — every product, every episode, the best chefs in the country using Graza in front of an audience that understands exactly why the spoon mountain exists.

There's a fourth product coming this spring. Unannounced. The 'Seriously Serious' platform will launch it too. Kali: "It's why we're so excited about this work, because it really does feel like more than just a campaign."

Graza built a brand by making olive oil feel like something worth caring about. The spoon mountain is them making the same argument about everything they'll ever make. Hellmann's has the shelf. Graza has the obsession. At 22,353 spoons deep, that's not nothing.